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You are listening to the Navigating Adult ADHD Podcast with your ADHD coach and expert, Xena. Hello, my friend. Welcome back. We are Navigating Adult ADHD today. And on Saturday I got a delivery and I had ordered my favorite artist. It was her calendar. So it's the 2026 calendar. 12 gorgeous prints of her work. Okay? And I'm obsessed, like literally obsessed. If you know me, you know I love bright colors, like neon things. Obsessed. And so anyway, I shared on Instagram, right? And if you're not following me, come hang out on Instagram. But I shared on Instagram that I'd got her calendar and like how beautiful it was and everything. And I tagged her in it and she replied to me saying, oh my God, fellow adhder unite. I was like, stop it. Of course she has adhd. This makes so much sense. All of the best humans do. All of my favourite people, we have got adhd. Isn't that awesome? Seriously made my day. And I thought in line with this episode, how appropriate, because today we are talking about some of the strengths and advantages that come with having adhd. Now I know you're all going to be like, oh yeah, but like, what about all of the hard stuff? Like, what about, you know, the fact that it's so hard to get things done or get started or make decisions and like, I never remember stuff. Okay, yes, we got loads of episodes on that, okay? But let's dedicate an entire episode to some of the amazing shit that we can do to some of the strengths and advantages. So I'm not saying that there aren't challenges, but I am saying there's definitely strengths and advantages and I want us to celebrate them and talk about them today. So that's what we're doing, my friends. Number one, I don't actually know how many I've got, but I'll probably lose count. But here we go. Number one, we are fucking great in a crisis. Like our brain, when there is a crisis, our brain starts getting fired with all of the chemicals that it needs and we just become super smart and often very, very calm. It's wild to me. I have a really good example of this. Years ago, I'd been working in the travel industry for just over a year and I was promoted to manage the store. So I was like running this store and. And I had been away on a three week holiday, right? I knew I'd got the job. I'd gone away for three weeks. I come back and it's my first day as the running this Store and this team. And like, I haven't had really any training. I haven't. Like, I already knew the job basically, but, like, I have, you know, I was kind of thrown in the deep end. And not to mention where we would normally have at least four people in the agency. So we had like a walk in travel agency. People would walk in off the street, they would be able to phone us, et cetera, right? And like, to give you an idea, like, we're turning over millions of dollars each year. Like, we're booking a shitload of travel. We are a busy agency, okay, where we would normally have four people, at least in the office. Ideally we would have five. We only had two that day, me and my assistant manager. That was it. All right? There was just literally two of us. And we get there and before we open the store for the day, we're checking the voice messages from the night before. And we listened to this voice message and my colleague's like, oh, fuck, you need to hear this. And I was like, oh, really? It's my first day. No, I don't. So anyway, she plays it. And we had had a customer, had booked some travel with one of our colleagues who was not there that day, and he had flown from New Zealand to the Ukraine. And when he arrived in the Ukraine, he did not have a visa. Now you need to have a visa to travel from New Zealand to the Ukraine. And he did not have a visa. How on earth he got out of New Zealand and boarded the plane. Like that was a whole thing, right? Anyway, he got there, he got to the Ukraine. What happened? He was arrested. He was literally put into jail. And he had only what was in his pockets. So he had his phone and his wallet. That was it. And his phone was running out of battery and he had phoned us and he was fucking pissed, of course. Like, we were the travel agency. It was our responsibility to provide him with a visa. And we had failed to do that. All right? My colleague had just thought, oh, no, he doesn't need one. And she didn't actually check. She'd made a mistake. So my first day, literally my first day store manager in the store. And we have got what went down in history in our company as one of the biggest shifts, storms ever. Because not only is this person then deported, but it was our fault. Like we had paperwork showing it was clearly our fault, right? Like you can imagine, like lawsuit waiting to happen. But we managed to like smooth it over, right? But the funniest thing is how quickly my brain went into problem Solving mode. Who needed to be called? What did we need to do? You know, what, what airline was it? Bring bring up the booking, who had booked it, like, everything. Get the paperwork out. We need to see, like, everything. My brain just went into, like, oh, my God, I'm so fucking smart and productive. And I've like, been doing this job for years. I know exactly what I'm doing. My first day, it was wild to me. Now, funny, funny thing that came of that is that client then went on to become one of my biggest clients, right? Like this guy who was literally arrested and deported and he went on like, him. And I ended up having this great relationship and he booked with me for years as a result of how I handled it and admitted straight away that we fcked up. Right? So, yeah, all of that to say, my friends, we are great in a crisis. Literally, our brain does. It gets the dopamine it needs, the norepinephrine, like, it starts firing, right? And we can become very calm and chill and we can handle shit. It's fantastic. All right, number two on my list. We can become a walking encyclopedia of something that we are interested in. Okay? And we can do this in like a matter of hours or days. I'll give you another travel agent example, actually. When I very first started this, this job, I had actually I'd been overseas for, I want to say, like an eight week trip. I'd gone overseas with a friend of mine and it was the first time I traveled, you know, further abroad. Like, we'd gone to the UK and Europe and then come back through New New York and some of eastern Canada, and we were away for two months. Anyway, I came home and I was like, oh, my gosh, I love travel. I want to get into this. And so I got this job in working in a travel agency. And a couple of weeks into the job, these people come in, this husband and wife, and they're wanting to book a trip and they're talking about how they want to go to Madagascar. Now, at that stage, my only experience of Madagascar was watching the movie, right? So the movie, the kids movie with the animals that can talk. Like, there's like a giraffe and I don't know, like a zebra. There's like all of these animals that can talk. It's like, it's a hilarious film, right? Kids film. So I thought that somebody had put them up to it and they were pranking me and they're like, yeah, so we want to fly to Madagascar and the airport is Antenna Narivo and I was like, whatever, That's a fucking made up word. And I was like, oh, ha ha ha. You're talking about the movie. I know. Ha ha. Where do you really want to go? And they stared at me. And I soon established, with a very quick Google search on my keyboard, that Madagascar is in fact a real place. It is real. It wasn't just for the movie. Fuck. So because of that experience, I decided I wanted to become an expert about all of the different places around the world. And I was just blown away. Although I felt like a bit of a dick, I was blown away to discover Madagascar's real. Holy shit. What's there? What else don't I know about? And so what I would do is I would take home the guides, like all of the different guidebooks inside the travel agency, all of the tour company books, all the things, right? I'd go home and I would just, like, obsess over learning about all the different countries around the world and all of the different airports and all of the different capitals. And, like, I literally became a travel encyclopedia. Even to this day, people will ask things or say things and I will, like, rattle off airport cod or like capital cities or like, things to see and do or like hotels to stay in. Like, it's crazy, right? I can't remember what I did yesterday, but some of this shit. Yeah, right. So again, we can literally become a walking encyclopedia of something that we are interested in. Like anything we're interested in. And sometimes very random things too. So another story to illustrate this is when it was a few years ago now, and there was a submersible, I want to say, like this, like, submarine sort of thing that went down to see the Titanic. And unfortunately it imploded. So when that happened and they didn't yet know what had. What. What had happened, and they were like, looking for wreckage and so forth. And you're hearing about it on the news, and I was like, huh? I didn't even know that you could go down and visit the Titanic wreckage. That's crazy. And then my brain's like, well, how far down is it? And so, you know, I'm looking this up and I was like, okay, well, that's not the bottom of the ocean. Well, how deep is the ocean? Okay, well, what lives down there? I stayed up till like 1 2am googling how deep the deepest parts of the ocean were, translating that into language I could understand, looking at all of the different sea life and things that live down there. Wild now. I became a bit of an encyclopedia on that Even if I go back and listen to previous episodes, like, a couple of years ago, I still had that knowledge because it had not long happened, whereas today, not so much. Right. Like, my interest in that has died down. But again, we literally can become a walking encyclopedia on something we are interested in. The key there is interest. Okay, number three, we can make connections that other people just can't. And often we can't even explain how we see what we see or know what we know, like, how we can do this. Okay. Now, I think movies are a great example of this. How often do you watch a movie only to guess the ending within, like, the first 10 minutes? So M. My partner is always saying to me, wow, you saw that coming? Or, how did you know? Have you seen this before? No, it's just this crazy pattern recognition that we have. And so, you know, there'll be so many movies that we're like, oh, yeah, he did it. Or, oh, yeah, they're gonna get together. You can just see exactly what's gonna happen. Like, it's just so obvious. And for other people are like, what? How do you know that? Are you sure? I don't think so. I'm like, yeah. So that ability to make connections and that pattern recognition, that's pretty fucking cool. All right, number. I think we're up to four. Four. We have an incredible ability to improvise. Okay. The other day, I had my friend Carrie. She's been on one of the episodes, and she is a home organizer for people with adhd. And she came into my membership and she was talking about decluttering. So she ran an entire workshop on how to declutter when you have adhd. So if you're in the adulting with ADHD membership, you. You will have seen that or you've got access to that. Right. And as she was doing that, she talked about our ability to improvise. And she said, you know, like, often we will hold on to things because we think that we might need them. And she said, but in reality, you're probably going to forget that you have it, so you're better off to get rid of it, because your ability to improvise is incredible. And she shared a few examples, but her one was just a few days before she thought she had a hand saw, a hand saw to, like, cut something. And she didn't. So she instead used her knee. She used her knee to break it in half. What? But again, like, that's our ability to improvise. Right? Like, we have this incredible creativity, this ability to, like, think different when I was traveling and I still do this like when I travel, right. If I'm staying in a hotel room where you typically don't have like kitchen facilities, you wouldn't have like knives and forks and spoons and bowls, right. What I would do is I would go to the grocery store. Especially, like when I was traveling quite a lot. I spent six months traveling around Central and South America. Right. And so you, you don't like, I'm staying in hotel rooms often, but you don't necessarily want to be constantly just eating out. So what I would do is I'd go to like the grocery store and I would buy a salad that was in like a plastic bowl and I would get some plastic cutlery that I might have had on the airplane that I've literally kept and then I would just wash it in the bathroom sink and I would buy stuff, like I would buy cereal and I would buy fruit and so forth. And I could chop up the fruit and eat it in this like plastic salad container thing that I would keep reusing as a bowl. So I was just so creative in that way in my ability to like reuse things and like I would use my hair ties to like keep plastic wrap over the fruit if it was like going to go bad, like all sorts of weird stuff. And I think that that has really instilled in me, and I see this in so many adhd, is this belief that like, I'll figure it out, I'll make it work. Because we have so much evidence for that for thinking outside the box, for using our creativity to figure things out, to make things work. And I love that. Alright, number I think five, we know a lot of interesting and random shit and we have a real variety of skills. And this often comes from. We've had so many different hobbies or different careers and different interests. Right. So for example, I know a shitload about cars and trucks. Yes, trucks. So from about age 5, I want to say my dad was a truck driver. And I decided at about 14 that I was going to become a diesel mechanic. Not just a regular mechanic who works on cars, No, a diesel mechan who works on like heavy giant trucks. And I actually worked in a diesel mechanic workshop for a year and a half and I was obsessed with motor racing, truck racing. I used to buy car magazines and read them and memorize stuff. So I have a lot of random knowledge about vehicles, way more than my partner, which is quite funny in our household. I also had this teacher, a client of mine who's a teacher Say the other day how one of her students commented how she seems to know something about everything. And she was like, yeah, of course, because I'm super curious and I have hyper focus. I was like, yeah, right. We are the Jack of all trades. That's us. I love hearing about the random things that my clients do. I learned one of my clients the other day, I'm definitely not going to name names, but he can hack like dark web hack. I was like, whoa, that's so fascinating. I wanted to ask all these questions. I have another client who does show jumping. I was like, wow, that's crazy. I would never have guessed that when I first met you. How cool is that? Another one who's obsessed with Egyptian history and can like spout off things I've never even heard of. It's fascinating. So again, we know a lot of interesting random stuff and have a variety of skills. Very cool. Number. I've lost count. Maybe six. Thinking outside the box. We think outside the box. So there was a woman actually on Reddit I read the other day, and she shared how at her work the office printer kept jamming. And so everybody thought that it was just broken, but she noticed that it only jammed after lunch and that was when the humidity would rise in the office. So she thought to herself, okay, what if we put a fan next to the printer? And guess what? The jamming disappeared, right? The printer just kept on working as normal. Now, her boss called that witchcraft, right? But her brain was thinking outside the box and it noticed the pattern recognition. Like, how fucking cool is that? Another really cool example of this, actually, and he's coming on the podcast soon to share his ADHD story, is my friend Logan. And Logan has built AI, what do we call them, bots. He's built some AI, like software, tech stuff. I don't even know what to call it. And what it does is it has collated books. So Logan is Kiwi dad on Instagram and he's got like over a hundred thousand followers and he has got like, he's really into parenting, right? He's sharing the dad's perspective on parenting young kids and they've got I think a one and a four year old. And he was really, really obsessed with like parenting and like wanting to be a really, really good dad and like share his knowledge, his experience, etc, and so he got a whole bunch of books that he really wanted to read. However, he didn't really have time, especially as a new new dad and a dad of like two toddlers, right? He didn't have Time to read all of these. So what he decided to do instead was get these. This AI software that is created or bought, whatever we call it, and put the books in there. So say there's like 10 different books, parenting books that he really wanted to read, but he didn't have time to read. And also he said, like, knowing I've got adhd, I might read something that's really good and forget I'd read it, even though it was a great idea, a great thing to do, I might forget. So he put them all into AI so that. And created this thing for himself and his wife so that anytime he was like, well, I don't know how to get my daughter to like, leave the playground when she's having a tantrum, he could literally go to AI, ask it that. And it would go to these 10 books that he had wanted to read or tried to read and not been able to finish. And it was skim through all of those and provide answers and information from those books. I was like, fucking brilliant. Way to think outside the box. Way to make it work for you. How cool is that? Another example I saw, I think this was actually on Reddit, is somebody had got their toothbrush and toothpaste and put it by the kettle that, like the jug, because they would always go and make their coffee in the morning, but they would so often forget to brush their teeth. Now, the funny thing about this is it reminded me when I was a teenager, I actually did the same thing because our bathroom in the house was like, way down the other end of the house with this weird layout in our house, whereas the kitchen was just outside my room. And so I put my toothbrush and toothpaste on the. The breakfast bar that lived above the kitchen sink. I put it there. And then I would actually remember to brush my teeth or I would do it more often because it was in my line of sight. Again, like, our ability to think outside the box is so cool. And the funny thing about this, though, is we often don't understand why somebody else hasn't seen what we've seen or done what we've done or suggested it. Because to us, it seems so obvious. But to them, they're like, wow, that was smart, right? My partner will say that to me all the time. Wow, you're so clever. And I'm like, that just seems really fucking obvious to me, right? So thinking outside the box. Okay, number. I don't even know. We lost count. I lost count. Anyway, the next one on the list, providing entertainment. Okay, we have an Incredible ability to be very entertaining. We are natural storytellers, so as ADHDers, we can turn any story, even something like, really mundane, into a full dramatic performance. Trust me, it is something I am really good at. If you follow me on Instagram, no doubt you will see this all the time. So I will often share photos of how I've got this, like, huge water glass, right? Like, it's the size of my head. It's a 1 liter glass jar, basically. And I drink maybe four of these things a day, but so often I will drink out of that and my brain's already moved on to the next thing and I haven't finished my drink until I end up with water all down my shirt. It happens so often, but I swear it's because, like, my brain's finished having a drink and we're moving on to, like, the next thing. Like, because my brain's going so fast and I end up with water on me. I love to share it because I think it's hilarious. Even just yesterday, oh my gosh, Speaking of entertainment, I had this hoodie that I was like, man, this needs a wash. And so I threw it in the washing machine with a load of stuff, not realizing I'd left tissues in the pocket. Oh my God, the dreaded tissues in the wash, right? Like, ugh. But not only had I left tissues in the pocket, my friend, I had left my ADHD medication in the pocket. That is right. My bottle of 5 ounce is in the pocket and went through the wash. Thank God there was only one tablet left in that bottle because I threw that. I threw that out real fast. Oh, my God. But like, I relived this and shared this story inside my community. I put it on Instagram this morning and I was like, oh my God. But so many people could relate to it, right? Like, it's entertaining. And that's something that we bring. We bring a lot of entertainment. Okay? And I'm dramatic, don't get me wrong. But I love that. I love when somebody's really passionate, enthusiastic, or dramatic and tells a story. How fun fun is that? Actually, another little related to this story I started working out again, I would say maybe six to eight weeks ago now. And when I first started doing that, for the first couple of weeks, I was telling everyone because I was walking, honestly, like a. Because everything hurt, right? I was walking, like, yeah, like, it was very obvious that I was in pain. Okay. And I would tell everybody that I now come with sound effects when I go up the stairs, when I try and sit down on the toilet, right? I'm going, oh, right. Like, literally, I did. I came with sound effects and I messaged my trainer and I said to him, not only do I come with sound effects, I no longer use moisturizer. I only use deep heat to get some muscle relief. Again, I think it's very entertaining, but also what I find really fascinating is the amount of, like, presenters and comedians who have adhd. And I'm always like, yeah, of course. That makes so much sense. So I'll give you a few examples of this. Trevor Noah. TRevor Noah has ADHD. Chris Rock. Jim Carrey, of course. Oh, my God, of course. Jim Carrey was adhd. Joe Rogan and Ty Pennington. Now, when I first saw Ty Pennington's name come up a few years ago in relation to adhd, I had to Google an image of him. And I went, oh, my God, yes. As soon as I saw him. And it was because I had watched him years ago. I must have been pretty young. And it was in the Extreme Makeover Home Edition. It's like this American show that they would, like, demolish houses and all sorts of stuff. It was like, wild. But I remember watching that so often. It was really, really good. And he had adhd. And I was like, oh, my God. Well, he does. He has adhd. And I was like, oh, my God, that makes so much sense because I really liked him. There was something about him. I was just, like, really liked about him. Yeah. So again, we provide entertainment. Now, my friends, this is by no means a complete list. Okay. A few other things that I would love to throw on this list. We can energize other people. We have a love of learning. We are incredible with our imagination. Like, our imagination, to me, is wild. And I love it. We're spontaneous, we're down for adventures, we're incredibly entrepreneurial. We make natural born entrepreneurs, and we are resilient as fuck. Okay, so again, not a complete list, but I just wanted to give you a little taste some of the amazing things, the amazing strengths and advantages that we have. Now, as you might know, I love being different. I love that I have ADHD and that I am not vanilla. Like, to me, I'm like, fuck, that would be so boring, right? I love that I am the goody goody gumdrops equivalent of ice cream. Nothing vanilla over here. I love that I have big feelings, that I feel things deeply. I love that I am sensitive to justice and I will fight like hell for what is right. I love being dramatic. Oh, my God. It makes everything way more interesting and fun. I love the bright, bold, out the box person that I am now. My adhd. It sets me apart from the dull, from the plain. And I would not trade my brain for anything now. I have not always felt that way. If you have listened to the podcast for a while, you will know that. You will know that I hated myself at one point. I couldn't even look at myself in the mirror. But I have done the work to get here, okay? And I have done that work to learn how my brain works, right? To enjoy the person that I am with the quirks and the weirdness and the whatever that I am have, Right? It's my friend. I really hope that you can do that too, and keep listening. Because that's what we do around here on this podcast and in the coaching and the programs. All right. Huge, huge, huge, huge love to you, my friend. Have a beautiful week. Hey, friend, if you want some more help navigating and thriving with ADHD and some help applying everything that you're learning here on the podcast, then head over to our website and navigating adultadhd. Com.